Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  When asked by a puzzled interviewer what they stood for, the leader stepped out and replied, “Death is a letter that was never sent.” The second stepped forth and explained, “Chicago is a rose!” The third stole the show by declaiming:“FRIED SHOES!”

  They then recited poetry to a jazz background. The jazz was all right, but the poetry was just typing.

  It became plain that they were neither holy nor barbaric. They were nihilism’s organization men giving demonstrations of how to be a non-conformist without risking one’s personal security: “Classes in nonconformism every Wednesday at 8:00 P.M. Please be on time.”

  It never got to be anything beyond typing because it never asserted itself in terms of an individual, but always in terms of “We” and “Us.” And art can never be asserted except in terms of “I.”

  So they passed on to their next booking. I hope that all three have found steady work by now. But surely no investigating committee is ever going to ask anybody, “Were you ever, or are you now, a Beatnik?” And it fell as far short of life artistically as it did politically. As Chicago today falls short in men and women of living vision. To have such men and women there must be believers. We have no great poet here because there is no real belief in poetry. And in this lack of belief our true corruption lies: not in the hearts of heroin pushers or prostitutes, but in a consciencelessness bred by affluence.

  Yet we have had prophets, we have had companions. We have had a man to say, “While there is a soul in prison I am not free.” We have had men and women who knew that a city of a hundred tents, owning the voice of single man speaking for the conscience of those hundred tents, is a city more enduring than that which we are now building.

  For the only city that endures is the city of the heart.

  Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright was a saint of architecture. Mr. Wright liked stone buildings, steel buildings, tall buildings and low buildings. He liked round buildings and square buildings. He even liked wet buildings and dry buildings. He liked expensive buildings better than he liked cheap buildings, but if there wasn’t any expensive building near at hand to like, Mr. Wright would just go ahead and like any old building. Nobody could stop him from liking buildings. It seemed as if there were some thing about buildings that just got Mr. Wright.

  What Mr. Wright thought made a city great was its buildings. How the people inside a building were feeling wasn’t as important to him as how the building was feeling. He thought that what was most important was how the whole scene looked when you took a sightline on it and saw all the stone buildings and all the steel buildings and all the tall buidings and all the low buildings and all the round buildings and all the square buildings and all the wet buildings and all the dry buildings.

  What I always thought was most important was the names on the doorbell in the hall.

  Therefore my own name, on the day that Mr. Wright’s skyscraper rises a mile hope-high into the air out of a foundation a mile dream-deep in stone, shall not be among those carved on its cornerstone. On the day that the double-tiered causeway is merged with the expressway that merges with the coast-to-coast thruway making right-hand turns every mile into a hundred solid miles of mile-high skyscrapers, each rising a mile hope-high to the sky out of a mile dream-deep in earth, my own name will not be brought up.

  But just in case anyone asks how I spelled it, look on the doorbell in the hall.

  I’ll be alright on that great day if only, in some woman’s court, a judge who is about to pass sentence on a girl with needlemarks on her arm without giving her legal defense, is told he can’t do that, it isn’t legal anymore.

  I’ll be all right if somewhere a narcotics detail puts a drug addict on the witness stand to testify against another addict and is then told to take her down, they can’t do that, it isn’t legal anymore.

  I’ll be all right if somewhere a prosecuting attorney changes a charge of using drugs to a charge of selling and finds he can’t do that, it isn’t legal anymore.

  City that walks with her shoulder-bag banging her hip, you gave me your gutters and I gave you back gold. City I never pretended to love for something you were not, I never told you you smelled of anything but cheap cologne. I never told you you were anything but a loud old bag. Yet you’re still the doll of the world and I’m proud to have slept in your tireless arms.

  I’ll be alright on that great day though you look on the doorbell in the hall and find my name isn’t there anymore. I’ll be alright so long as it has been written on some cornerstone of a human heart.

  On the heart it don’t matter how you spell it.

  CHICAGO IV

  THE IRISHMAN IN THE GROTTO, THE MAN IN THE IRON SUIT, AND THE GIRL IN GRAVITY-Z: THE PLAYBOY MAGAZINE STORY or MR. PEEPERS AS DON JUAN

  Of all my childhood dreams, the one I most cherished was that of someday getting to spurn somebody with less money—and now my chance had come! There would, I felt certain, be only our own select circle taking turns hawking spit graciously over an elegant ironwork balustrade upon a rabble eager to bear any indignity in exchange for the privilege of being spurned.

  They would, of course, be kept under control by our Boys in Blue, any one of whom can handle a dozen of these street-corner subhumans; provided he has a good mount under him and eleven colleagues equally well mounted.

  But when the guardians of the Victorian mansion on North State failed to ask either my name or unique qualifications, but merely indicated a red-carpeted stairway I could climb or not, whichever I wished, my dream went pfft. If this was the kind of place I could get into, I thought resentfully, who the hell were they keeping out?

  I can tell you right off that though not everybody in town gets invited to house parties thrown by the editor and publisher of Playboy Magazine, everybody comes all the same. The only people not invited are those employed by Esquire, who don’t want to come anyhow. They’re waiting for an invitation from Huntington-Hartford.

  The great baronial hall was serving as a guest room for a gaggle of humans wearing all the clothes anyone could possibly need to break into society once they found a society to break into.

  This plainly wasn’t it. This was high shlockhouse—employing the term in its Milwaukee Avenue sense to indicate a furniture store using colored lighting to lend an expensive glow to its sofas and chairs, and deducting the light bill from the markup later. I began stepping off a twenty-speaker stereophonic hi-fi which ran the length of four divans, or two inches shorter than the SS United States, while a young woman was coming down the other side pricing the stuff, unaware that the rosy glow didn’t go with the dream. Wait till she owned that orange divan for her very own and turned up the kerosene lamp—“Get your leather jacket and meet me down at the chicken-run,” she’d cry, “I’ve been had!” I hadn’t seen anything like it since Joan Crawford threw the lingerie party in Dance, Fools, Dance. There just isn’t enough of that sort of thing today.

  If what was going on here was high society, Caroline Kennedy is president of the Veteran Boxers’ Association.

  A three-piece band, each member six degrees cooler than the next, began playing cool chords in a nook strangely dominated by a suit of medieval armor. How a suit of armor had gotten in here I couldn’t begin to fancy, unless the musicians had rented it to throw a protective shadow across themselves in event people showed up who’d been present at the last place they’d played.

  I walked over to get a closer look. I couldn’t climb up to look inside as it was on a pedestal. Even if it were in a hole I wouldn’t have been able to tell who was in there.

  The ratio of males to females was roughly five to three, I’m sure I don’t know why. Unless it was because male employees are requested to bring wives and girl friends while female employees are instructed to come alone.

  Even with the odds so heavy in their favor, the males still looked as if they were attending only because they hadn’t risen high enough in the Playboy hierarchy to risk going to bed nights. Because when you work for Playboy you have t
o keep in touch with the arts, and when you feel you’re getting out of touch you’ll do well to catch up in your employer’s parlor, as a chance to slip two pounds of sugar into a colleague’s gas tank may present itself.

  I wheedled the bartender, implying that if he’d let me have a glass of champagne for fifteen cents I’d leave some in the glass for him, pretending to be joshing but letting him know I meant it.

  “Champagne is on the house,” he cut me short.

  “Make that a double, boy, and keep your fingers out of the glass,” I let him know who was boss now.

  I toted the glass, which he’d filled to brimming out of sheer spite, to the cool nook to have another look at that cool suit. I walked around it to see whether I could see light coming through the chinks. Something told me there was somebody in there—otherwise why was he keeping his helmet down?

  Then the cool people struck up The Peppermint Twist—the same beat that was so abhorred, a couple years ago, when accompanied by Elvis Presley, that TV cameras were forbidden to pick him up below his waist. Every cad in the room was now working his hips wildly toward the nearest girl, and if the nearest party wasn’t a girl, another cad seemed to do. The girl-cads were equally unselective. There was nothing wrong in any of this because everybody took great care not to touch or be touched by any other cad.

  It’s alright all night

  It’s okay all day—

  I stood trying to keep my champagne from spilling because of the shaking the floor was taking. I didn’t want to resort to standard barroom procedure for trembling glasses—that of using one’s cravat as a pulley by which to heist the glass to the lips, as I lacked a cravat. I didn’t even have a tie. All I could do was to hope that, in the heat of The Twist, one of the young women might fling off her bra and I could use that for a pulley. I was paying the price of being badly groomed.

  You gotta twist, you gotta turn

  You gotta dance to learn

  You gotta move right in the groove—

  Most of the girls looked like their bras had been wired on in puberty—well fitted but unreleased. In no time at all now they’d be using the wire cutters but then it would be too late. The panic would be on.

  You gotta rock, you gotta reel

  You gotta get that certain feel—

  Although most of the girls appeared to have been snatched from behind a receptionist’s desk in the august chambers of the Greater Michigan Avenue Marching Society And Single Gentlemen’s Band and given a bouffant hairdo for the present occasion, they also looked as if they had been told to keep their pretty mouths shut. Or maybe silence was their own idea. At any rate they didn’t seem to communicate even when twisting violently.

  You gotta slide you gotta drive

  You got to make your fingers pop

  You got to join the social hop—

  Everyone seemed to be trying to join herself as though she’d been away too long. And the men were trying just as hard to twist themselves into finding out who they really were—My baby wrote me a letter

  Just got it in the mail

  Told me that she’d marry me—

  I’m so happy that I got to wail—

  one more time!

  one more time!

  one more time!

  I studied the competition but all I could see was editors who would have been floorwalkers had it not been for the paperback boom. The 5-3 odds in my favor rose to 16-10, still in my favor. This realization made me so light headed that I drained the champagne in a single movement without spilling a drop-isn’t it wonderful what confidence can do? The second the stuff hit I began to twist myself—and the moment the music quit I steered up to a dark-haired child with a full-blown figure in a bikini and said, “You look like you came out of some water still I don’t see no pool,” intending this as a sharp comment. Without losing one twist she pointed to a stairway and said, “The pool is downstairs, Pops.”

  When I see my baby

  Gonna take her in my arms

  Just the thrill of one more kiss—

  one more time!

  one more time!

  one more time!

  I passed three bars where other guests were freeloading, spiraled down a spiral stair and into a swimming suit and with the cry, “Me John A. McCone! You Jane!” I struck out for the waterfall which divides the pool from the Woo Grotto.

  I have no grudge against waterfalls even when they splash me. The resentment I took to this one was because the water it splashed me with was warm pink. Nonetheless I completed the course.

  In the grotto, a cream-colored girl in a salmon-colored bikini and a bouffant hairdo with strands that went wandering like those of a girl’s hair underwater, was lolling on air cushions the hue of an evening sea. Whether she was bucking a strong headwind in a Mercedes-Benz or was a plate of creamed salmon I couldn’t be certain. Since I couldn’t see anyone driving I settled for salmon.

  Any man who puts up fifty dollars for a tin key with a rabbit’s head on it has an obligation to society to be choosy about air cushions, so I picked one of smoking chartreuse with a vermilion stripe and another of smoldering chartreuse with a urine-colored stripe. If this girl challenged me by asking, “Let’s see your key,” my defense would be that there have been no pockets in my trunks since I began wearing them while playing guard for the Kedzie Avenue Arrows, circa 1926. I made a very strong impression at that time.

  Yet how had this cream-and-salmon child come through a cataract without getting damp? Anybody who can emerge from a waterfall without getting wet shows that talent can spring up anywhere. The only other explanation I could entertain was that I was in a panel joint and she’d come through a wall.

  I listened to hear if I could detect breathing on the other side, but all that came to my ears was that ceaseless beat—One more time!

  One more time!

  That’s not from Kismet.

  I looked at the girl implacably just to see how long she could bear it without breaking. “I am J. M. Anslinger,” I informed her; “I own all the heroin in the United States.”

  “Seeing is believing,” she apprised me. “Let’s see some.”

  “I don’t carry it on me.”

  “Cheating proves.”

  “I don’t have to prove it,” I assured her. “I wrote a biography of Frank Sinatra, so you have to take my word.”

  “That might mean something to somebody who is here,” she told me.

  “You give an impression of being present,” I encouraged the child.

  “You don’t dig,” she assured me, dreamily uncoiling.

  “I have a shovel but I don’t know where to start,” I offered.

  “I know right from wrong but I can’t get foot on the ground either way. I’m like in orbit without a pressure suit. Nothing can happen to me because everything that happens to me is really happening to somebody else.”

  “How did you get into Gravity-Z without a runway, honey?” I employed my solicitous tone.

  “All I know is that on my better days it seems like it wouldn’t be bad to be half alive, but I can’t find a reason for making the effort.”

  “For somebody in a vacuum,” I observed, “your sense of self-preservation seems to be functioning well. On top of that, you have a very good built. Shall we try the steam room?”

  My languid logician turned with no word and jack-knifed into the woo. The cataract gleamed in the flow and the splash, and as she came up on the other side, shone rose upon her flippers. She flipped me one rose-colored farewell and was gone wherever they go: good gravity-zero girls, midair babies built like jaguars and checkered like cheetahs yet who can’t get a paw on the ground either way.

  For they rise from all waters dry as bone.

  Having no further reason for getting wet myself, I decided to hold the grotto against all comers till the next playmate of any month came along. If I could keep my mouth shut perhaps one would de-orbit.

  “I do talk too much,” I had to admit ruefully to myself.
I’ve always wondered what admitting things ruefully to oneself was like. Now I knew.

  “I do talk too much,” the grotto’s low echo agreed with me, sounding even more ruefully-admitting than myself.

  “You’re a little slow on the pickup,” I reproached the echo; “stay on your toes there, Grotto.”

  “A little slow on the pickup, stay on your toes, Otto,” it replied.

  “My name isn’t Otto,” I explained.

  “My name isn’t Otto either.”

  “I know your name isn’t Otto, Grotto.” I was losing patience.

  “And it isn’t Grotto either. It’s O’Connor.”

  “I never heard of a grotto named O’Connor.”

  “We changed the family name in honor of Tay Pay O’Connor. Before that it was O’Connaught. Tommy’s the first name.”

  “Not terrible Tommy?”

  “None other. Been here ever since I broke out of the old County Jail. Only had to walk three blocks. Took the first job I found open.”

  “Don’t give me that. There wasn’t anything like Playboy around in 1920.”

  “No. But there was a grotto. There always was a grotto, Otto. The Playboy plant was built around a grotto, and the PR department was built around me. The whole Playboy thing developed around the concept of an Irishman in a grotto.”

  “Being Irish ain’t that great, O’Connor.”

  “Not a matter of being Irish—I just knew that if I kept on being myself, Terrible Tommy, sooner or later Terrible Tommy was sure to be caught. Didn’t the signs in all the post offices say TOMMY (Terrible) O’CON-NOR WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE? They didn’t say DEAD OR MERELY EXISTING, did they? You see? A loophole! How can you pin a dead-or-alive fugitive warrant upon a man who isn’t alive yet neither is he dead? You dig?”

  “No, man, I don’t dig.”

  “Like simple, cat. All I had to do was to stop walking in the first person and start walking in the third. When I got the hang of that, I found myself thinking in the third person instead of the first. I found I could get as much kick out of watching somebody else fall in love than fall in love myself—and look how much safer! It was like doing the twist spiritually—you go through the motions like you’re very excited—but the real point of all the motion is that, while you’re moving you can’t get caught. The only trouble is—”